Chapter 9: Stage One Begins
An ingenious element of Utzon's design of Sydney Opera House is the way much of the machinery and workings of the House are folded out of sight, beneath the public and performance spaces. Changing rooms, rehearsal spaces, the smaller theatres additional to the main halls, as well as much of the stage machinery, are all contained in this substructure, the podium.
Both ingenious and � with so much to accommodate - also challenging, the podium gives the impression of a strong base from the outside while inside it is a maze of rooms and corridors, busy with the smooth running of constantly changing productions. Actors, dancers, musicians and administrators all share this space in preparation for the performances that will occur around them.
Implicit in the structure of the podium is an understanding of the profound beauty, strength and permanence of ideas Utzon brought to bear in designing the opera house.
Back in 1949, years before the competition had been announced and whilst in his early thirties, Utzon was awarded a study trip to the Americas. In the north, he visited the great architects, Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen. And in South America, he visited several sites of Mayan and Aztec architecture, including Monte Alban in the Sierra Madre, and Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. These epic platforms had a profound influence on Utzon and he was deeply moved by the ideas behind the ancient monuments.
Utzon looked past the brutality of both Mayan and Aztec cultures to see how these platforms elevated people above the canopy of their forest dwellings and daily lives, to a transcendent plateau where, beneath the sky, they could commune with their gods and higher culture.
This idea is elementally expressed in the podium of Sydney Opera House. Its long procession of shallow stairs lead up to a plateau upon which people commune with art under a sculptural canopy, elevated and transported away from their everyday lives.
Utzon successfully reached back thousands of years to express this same majestic idea in the modern world; an imperishable idea that provides a strong physical and intellectual grounding for the opera house.
It is also an idea that fundamentally endured unchanged from his first winning sketches through to the finished building.
During its construction, it often directly evoked the Mayan architecture it was derived from and when complete, appeared as an already beautiful and extraordinary structure, with the undercarriage of the stairs exposed and its dual amphitheatre-like foundations at the seaward end of the platform.
The logistics of building the podium involved drafting detailed working drawings of the structure and its interiors, level by level. The work would then be tendered to a building firm, under the supervision of Ove Arup and Partners and SOHEC. Utzon's office of architects produced these drawings in a document called the October Scheme.
Tenders were invited the following November and the contract awarded to Civil and Civic, who had submitted the lowest quote. This quote would in time prove to have been too low by half, and Civil and Civic would seek to recapture their expenditure from the New South Wales Government through arbitration � much to the annoyance of Ove Arup who had already warned against starting construction too early, and whose firm was perceived to be responsible for oversight of Civil and Civic's work.
Two major problems confronted the engineers in their approach to Stage One. Firstly, the geology of Bennelong Point had not been accurately surveyed at the time of the competition guidelines, which assumed that the promontory was comprised of Hawkesbury sandstone mass, like the surrounding land, whereas in fact, it was made of loose alluvial deposits, permeated with sea water and completely unsuitable for bearing the weight of the intended structure.
Some 700 steel-cased concrete shafts, nearly a metre each in diameter were bored down into the perimeter and northern half of the site. Mass concrete foundations filled in the unstable rock in the central area of the site. Given all this preparatory work, it is not hard to understand why Civil and Civic's quote for the work was so inaccurate.
The second major problem related to the as yet unknown weight of the roof, which would change profoundly in the coming years. The anchor points of the roof were at this stage only vaguely discernible; the load they would have to bear was unknown.
Nevertheless, from March 1958 on, the awe-inspiring form of the podium rose out of the enormous building site on Bennelong Point, slowly transforming the promontory � a scene which author Patrick White described as evoking the ruins of ancient Mycenae.
One of the most remarkable features of the podium and one Utzon was most happy with, were the concourse beams, designed by Ove Arup himself.
It was suggested in Utzon's submission sketches, that the concourse area, under the grand staircase would require some form of colonnade to support the weight of the structure above. When Arup saw this detail, he dismissed the need for the columns, describing instead the undulating shape of the now famous concourse beams.
The beams, in their final design, so successfully dispersed moments of stress that no additional vertical support was necessary. They provide a beautiful and dramatic sweeping form to the underside of the grand staircase, which continues up through the levels of entrance finishing just under the beginning of the vaulted arches.
This shape, when seen in cross section is best described as a progression of capital letters, from U to T to V and back again. The powerful, elegant form that emerges utterly thrilled Utzon who henceforth called them 'Ove's invention' in recognition of their contribution to the finished design of the House.
Despite their later estrangement, the concourse beams represent a lasting reminder of the close relationship between the two great men.
Stage One would take 5 years to complete, closing on the original estimate of time made by Stan Havilland for the opera house project as a whole. Even then, it would require significant modification to withstand the final designs for the roof. Yet, Utzon's extraordinary platform had been realised and Sydneysiders began to comprehend the incredible feat of design and engineering being undertaken in the name of culture.
